Skinner, B. F. (1904–1990)

Basic Concepts

Skinner maintained that the goal of any science is to discover the lawful relationships among natural events in the environment. For psychology, this meant studying behavior and the events that change behavior. Skinner's experiments indicated that the immediate consequences of behavior are responsible for behavioral change. For example, an infant accidentally shakes a rattle, the action produces a sound (consequence), and the infant repeats the action again and again. The outcome, the sound, has changed the infant. It responds in the future as a changed being, shaking the rattle whenever the opportunity arises.

Outcomes that lead to an increased frequency of a behavior are reinforcers. In the laboratory, Skinner demonstrated the role of reinforcement in learning when, for example, he taught pigeons to play Ping-Pong and rats to hoard marbles. These sets of behaviors are the result of a schedule of intermittent reinforcement such that the responses more and more approximate the final [Page 832]complex behavior. This process is referred to as shaping.

In human beings, complex behaviors such as reading result from varied schedules of any of myriad reinforcers that shape behavior. Among them are, initially, the teacher's commendations for the child's correct reading of individual words to, eventually, the child making sense of the sentences. In other words, behavior is not determined from within but is shaped by its consequences. Skinner named his behavioral principles operant conditioning because an operant is a behavior that operates on the environment to produce reinforcing consequences. The two key processes in operant conditioning are variation (of behavior) and selection by consequence. Different behaviors are executed, but only some are strengthened (increase in frequency) by the outcomes.

Applications of Skinner's principles include programs for behavioral management, often referred to as behavior modification. Implemented in a variety of clinical, institutional, and educational settings in the 1960s and 1970s, they continue to be used by researchers and clinicians. Behavioral management was one aspect of the curriculum reform in public education in the 1960s.

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